Things ain't going well for Nokia. Their quarterly results are - again - a disaster, and Lumia sales have dropped 28% (50% if you look at just the US). Windows Phone 8 is really going to be a make-it-or-break-it kind of thing. If it doesn't go well, the company might consider going back to focussing on rubber boots.

Users knew for months that old Lumias couldn't get v8 so it was expected that sales could drop and drop a lot since smartphones users, expecially in a niche like Windows Phone, tend to be more conservative (many of them have already been burned by phone makers not to support newer OS versions).

Still those Lumias are great devices. They only need to get more apps because, after all, it's all about apps.

I recentely switched from Galaxy SII to Lumia 900 (wanted to wait for 920 but had the chance not to pay that phone) and, apart from apps number, there's no turning back to me, not even to SIII which I had the chance to get. Plus, Lumia users will get sort of WP7.9 with more functionalities from WP8 than regular users, according to Nokia itself.

We all knew this was going to be a mid-term strategy. And if I was Microsoft and Nokia, I'd pour millions into buying or funding developers to release hundreds or thousands of great apps because that's the difference today.

The only thing MS and Nokia are doing plain wrong is to wait for independent developers to become active and make apps because while they think about that, platform will lag.

Create 50-100 great apps and phones (and platforms) will sell like bread...

I used a Lumia 8/900 for a while, tbh they are very nicely designed phones, the OS failed to perform as good as expected, IE: Lockscreen freeze for like 5 secs, frequent freezes.. (After almost a week uptime, but that's no excuse)

They did exactly that. Microsoft and Nokia produce WP apps like crazy. But like the argument "we just need to put 1 billion $ into marketing" it does not work out.

Its the overall product that sells, not only the number of apps. The Lumia hardware is good (or should I say the N9 hardware?), the apps are not bad either and there was the biggest marketing splash Nokia ever did for a phone. It all makes no difference. Customers just do not buy WP (not only Nokia Lumia but just any WP devices out there including those from other companies). WP is just not good enough compared to competition.